The Arraignment

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

With his forty-five making a dimple in Ibarra’s back, and the long guns in the linen bag, Herman marches Ibarra to the service elevator and pushes 8 to go down.

We drop two levels. Herman takes a quick look out. We brush by a maid on our way out of a service area and out onto the eighth floor.

Each level forms a kind of open terrace, hanging gardens of Babylon, looking over a vast atrium that forms the interior of the pyramid.

Halfway down the hall, a young couple comes breezing out of their room.

Ibarra sees the open door. His thought is nearly palpable, and for an instant I freeze, afraid he is going to run for the room and Herman will shoot him.

Herman nudges him with the gun. “Don’t even think about it.” He has a towel over the pistol, draped across his arm as if he should be carrying a finger bowl in the other hand.

As soon as we are past the couple and out of earshot, he talks to me from the corner of his mouth. “Be easier just throw the fucker off the balcony,” he says. “Score him on his swan dive in the lily pond down there.”

“Herman, we don’t know that he killed Julio. And even if he did, it’s a matter for the police.”

“I didn’t.” Ibarra waddles in front of him with the gun in his back.

“You gonna be walking with your ass on your shoulders, you don’t shut up,” says Herman.

A few doors down I find the number that matches the one penciled on the little envelope with the key card I got when I checked in downstairs.

I slide it through the lock and hear it click.

Inside with the door closed, Herman checks the bathroom and the closet, then pulls the curtains closed on the window and pushes Ibarra backward onto the bed. “Now I wanna hear you talk.”

“You have met my sons?” he says.

“Only one of them. Arturo. The other, Jaime is it? He wasn’t there.”

“You are probably lucky. Jaime has a bad temper. They have been involved in activities for which I am ashamed.”

“And I suppose they did this all by themselves?” says Herman.

“I admit at times I have done things for which I am not proud. But I didn’t want my sons to grow up this way. I have tried every way to stop them. Even gone to the authorities. But you know what Cancun can be like.”

“Here we go,” says Herman. “Fuckin’ mistakes been made. Next he be tellin’ us he got religion when he seen the light coming outta the little hole at the end of my gun.”

“Believe me. I have tried to stop my sons, but they will not listen. All they want is my money, to finance their schemes. When I refused, they found other sources.”

“Narcotics?” I ask.

“For a time. But that stopped. I was able to influence certain people.”

“Your children cuttin’ into your profits, were they?”

“I do not deal in drugs. I do not allow them on the premises of my hotel.”

“You wrote a letter to a lawyer in San Diego, a Mr. Nicholas Rush. What was that about?”

Ibarra looks at me, puzzled. “How do…”

“Never mind that. What did Mr. Rush have to do with your sons? And who or what is Mejicano Rosen?”

“Then you know about it? It is pronounced Roseton. Not Rosen.”

“What is it?” I ask.

“Roseton means Rosette in Spanish. The French under Napoleon, when they found it, they named it the stone of Rosette after the name of the village in Egypt where it was discovered. The English called it Rosetta.”

“What’s this shit?” says Herman.

“The Rosetta Stone,” I say. “It’s a fractured slab of rock found by Napoleon’s forces when they invaded Egypt. It was engraved with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs along with a Greek translation. It allowed archeologists for the first time to understand the language of pharoahs.”

Herman has a dense look on his face. “Wait a minute. You lost me. You tellin’ me this ’bout some rock from Egypt?”

“No,” says Ibarra. “The Mejicano Roseton in your language is the Mexican Rosetta. It is the last remaining key to the ancient hieroglyphs of the Maya.”

“Do you have it?” I ask.

“Unfortunately no.”

“Where it is?”

“I cannot be sure, but I know that it exists and that it is priceless. My sons have been trying to acquire it.”

“Is that what Nick Rush was after?”

He nods. “He had been doing business through another man.”

“Gerald Metz?”

“How did you know that?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

“This man Metz had done business with my sons previously.”

“What kinda business?” says Herman.

“My boys were looting archeological sites. At first they were simply buying a few trinkets from the Indians who found things in the jungle, small figures carved in jade, sometimes trinkets in silver or gold. My sons would then sell these items to dealers in your country or in Europe. Wherever they could be paid the most. Occasionally they would find something more valuable.

“Then Arturo and Jaime began locating sites that were still covered by jungle. They are easy to spot if you know what you are looking for. In the Yucatan, the jungle floor is flat. Any rise, a small mound, what looks like a hill, is very often the remains of a Mayan structure overgrown by trees and vines. They learned how to find these. They hired laborers and destroyed sites, looking for treasure.”

“Didn’t your government try to stop them?”

“They tried. But it is impossible. There are too many locations, not enough guards. Your government demands that we control the flow of narcotics through our country. That is the priority. The sale of looted artifacts is a huge business. Thousands of items are taken every year from Mexico and Guatemala and sold on the black market. Some of these people are drug dealers. They make more selling artifacts than they do selling drugs, and there is less risk. You do not go to prison for life for stealing Mayan relics.”

“Who would buy them?” I ask.

“There are people who deal in such things. They sell the items to wealthy Americans, so their wives can have figurines made into earrings and tell their friends where they came from. The larger, more expensive items are another matter.”

“That’s what we saw at the trailer,” I tell Herman.

“What?” says Ibarra.

“It looked like a large slab of stone, like a headstone, only taller. We couldn’t see it very well. They had it covered with a blanket.”

“Tell me. Did you see white paint on it?”

“On a corner, under the blanket. It looked like whitewash.”

“A stela,” he says.

“What estella?” says Herman.

“A stela. It is a stone sign used by the Maya for historical and religious purposes. They would cover the stone in white limestone plaster. Then they would carve their hieroglyphs into this softer material. There are maybe thirty or forty of them that we know of, and most of them cannot be read. The jungle moisture has destroyed the writing. I had heard that my sons had found one.”

“So they’d sell it, right?” says Herman.

“Yes.”

“How much they get?”

“If the one they have is legible, tens of thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand U.S. dollars. If what is on it is important, if it reveals unknown information about Mayan rulers, their civilization, it could be worth much more.”

“And this ain’t the Rosetta thing you was talking about?”

Ibarra shakes his head.

“That be worth more, right?”

“You cannot put a value on the Mejicano Roseton.”

“Tell us about it?” I say.

“I take it you have never seen a picture of the Mayan codices?”

“Uh… ah…” Herman looks at him.

“They are books made of tree bark that has been flattened and covered with a lime paste, like the stelae. The pages are folded like an accordion and painted in vivid colors with hieroglyphs.

“There are only four of them known to be in existence. They are located in various museums around the world: Dresden, Madrid, Paris. One is in the hands of a private collector. They are the only remaining books of Mayan history written by the original scribes. All of the others were destroyed by Spanish missionaries. The books were believed by the Spaniards to be tools of the devil.

“A Franciscan missionary, his name was Diego de Landa, he burned hundreds of the Mayan books in the great auto-da-fe in 1562.”

“What the fuck’s a auto dafay?” says Herman “The Inquisition. The Spaniards burned the books, along with the Mayan scribes who wrote them, so that the books could not be re-created.”

“What’s this got to do with this Rosetta thing?”

“I am getting to that. Before de Landa burned all of the Mayan books, about forty years earlier, a group of Spaniards were shipwrecked in the Caribbean off the coast of what is now Mexico. They were washed up on a beach on the Yucatan not far from here, and they were captured by the Mayas. All of them were put to death, except two. A man named Gonzalo Guerrero and a shipmate named Jeronimo de Aguilar. These two survived. They lived with the Maya in captivity for eight years, until the Conquistador Hernan Cortes, the man who conquered the Aztecs, heard about them and paid a ransom.

“De Aguilar went back and became the translator for Cortes. He became very important in the conquest of the Mayas.”

“The other man, Guerrero, did not go back. He had married a daughter of one of the Mayan rulers and became a Mayan warlord.”

“He went native,” says Herman.

“Yes.”

“And he taught the Mayas the battle tactics of the Spaniards. Leading a Mayan army, he defeated the Spaniards at a place called Cape Catoche. When the Spanish government learned of this, they wanted him dead.”

“But what’s this got to do with the Rosetta?”

“This man Guerrero lived and fought the Spaniards for twenty years until they killed him in 1536. They shot him with an harquebus, a kind of primitive musket. Guerrero knew that sooner or later the Spaniards would kill him. He also knew that they would destroy Mayan civilization as he knew it. So he had the scribes prepare a secret codex. A great Mayan book of hieroglyphs. This not only told their history and listed their rulers, but it also described the various city states that existed before the Spaniards came and how they interacted with one another.

“But the important part, what no one had ever done before, because they could not, was that Guerrero translated the hieroglyphs into Spanish. He included this translation as part of the codex.”

“The Mexican Rosetta,” I say.

“Yes. People have been able to work out a majority of the hieroglyphs, but they cannot be absolutely certain they are correct. And there are still twenty maybe thirty percent of the hieroglyphs that remain a mystery. These are the more complex and important ones. They may reveal things about the Mayas that have been lost and forgotten for centuries.”

“You know a lot about this,” says Herman. “Why?”

“I have been trying to purchase the Mejicano Roseton for three years. Without success. I have made a great deal of money constructing buildings and doing business. I wanted the Mejicano Roseton to remain in this country. It is part of its heritage.”

“So who has it?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “For years it was believed to be in the possession of Indians in Chiapas. The Mexican government has been dealing with a kind of indigenous independence movement there for some time. About ten months ago, I was told that it had been sold, to raise money for arms and food. The Mexican Army was closing in on the Indians. They did not want it to fall into the hands of the government, where it would be put on display in Mexico City. So they sold it.”

“And you don’t know who bought it?” I ask.

“No. But I believe that my sons may have it.”

“That don’t make any sense,” says Herman. “Why the note telling you to bring it?”

“Herman, let him finish.”

“What note?” says Ibarra.

“Never mind. Go on.”

“It is just that I found out that my sons were negotiating with this man Metz to deliver the Mejicano Roseton to an American buyer. According to the information I had, this buyer was represented by Mr. Rush.”

“That’s why you wrote the letter?”

“Yes. I wanted him to know that I knew what was going on. And that I intended to stop it.”

Nick’s only contact to the world of art and collectibles was through Dana. And the only one she knew with connections sufficient to peddle something on the scale of the Rosetta was Nathan Fittipaldi.

“But something of the scale of the Mexican Rosetta would be impossible to display in a museum. Even a private collector would have to hide it,” I tell him.

“Private collectors, people who have that kind of money, often have private collections; they show a few trusted friends and keep it as a secret. There are those who would be willing to exercise patience, to hold it and wait. A museum might possibly take it.”

“They’d never be able to exhibit it. The Mexican government would be all over them.”

“Probably. But it would come down to a legal claim,” says Ibarra. “The museum would probably say that the Rosetta had been in a storage crate for decades. I have heard that such things happen. It shows up as an indistinct item on an old bill of lading. The document may date to the nineteen twenties.”

“Meaning that the item was found in an earlier expedition?”

“Exactly. Museums have warehouses filled with such items. They might not catalogue them for decades. Who is to say it wasn’t there? They simply claim that they did not realize its significance until they opened the crate and examined its contents. Of course my government would demand its return. But it is unlikely that they would succeed. The Indians of Chiapas might complain and tell the world that they sold it only months before, but who is going to listen to them?”

“So you think your boys got it?” says Herman.

Ibarra shrugs his shoulders. “I believe it is a possibility.”

“Maybe we should go down and ask ’em.” Herman looks at me.

“The last time we went down there, we had three cars and six men with guns. This time it’s just you and me.”

“Yeah, but last time I wasn’t motivated,” says Herman. “Besides, people at that trailer look like they just crawled outta mud huts. The brothers wouldn’t be able to trust ’em in the jungle with bullets. Their guns probably all rusted up.”

“I don’t know. The one they had pointed at the back of your head looked pretty good.” I turn my attention back to Ibarra. “What do you know about a place called Coba?”

“It’s an archeological site. Very large, more than seventy kilometers square, I believe. Maybe two hours south of here, in the jungle. Why?”

“Does it draw a crowd, many tourists?” I ask.

“No. Very few in fact. Most of what is there remains to be discovered. It is still covered by jungle. They don’t expect to uncover it all for perhaps another fifty years.”

“That’s why they picked it,” says Herman.

“Who?”

“Your sons, if they’re to be believed,” says Herman.

“Have you ever been there, to Coba?”

“Yes. Two or three times.”

“Do you know a place there called the Doorway to the Temple of Inscriptions?”

He thinks about this for a moment. “The tourist literature, they give all kinds of names to these ruins to get the tourists excited. You know, get them thinking about men with whips and fedoras in leather jackets so they will visit.”

“What else did the note say?” I look at Herman.

“Place had painted walls or something.”

“Oh, you mean Las Pinturas. Yes, I know where that is. A stone structure with a small room on top. Inside of this room there are columns with painted hieroglyphs and inscriptions carved on the walls. They retain some of the dyes and stains put on by the Mayas.”

“Could you take us there?”

“I suppose I could.” He looks at Herman, probably thinking that a trip to Coba is better than getting shot.

“You got any people can help us?” says Herman.

“What, to kill my sons?”

“No, no. They show up, I do that. Less you wanna help. I’m thinkin’ maybe drive cars, play lookout. I mean somebody ain’t gonna sit and stare at whipped cream on a camera all afternoon.”

“I have people,” says Ibarra.

“Yeah. Seen your people.” Herman slips his pistol back into the fanny pack and drops it in the bag. “Still I suppose we better go back upstairs, wake up ladle-head. See if he figured how to undo his belt buckle yet.”